


I am not to blame for my incompetence

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (luther in season 1 it's ok you know about it), Adopted Sibling Relationship, Brotherly Bonding, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Loss of Virginity, Panic Attacks, Protective Ben Hargreeves, Sex Jokes, Talking To Dead People, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 12:24:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20564300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Klaus realized he lived in a family of murders at the very same moment that his family realized that their brother might not have been as incompetent and useless as they once thought. Well, always thought, but that's a different story.





	I am not to blame for my incompetence

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so, listen. I feel like I need to explain why the ghosts in this aren't talking the way they do in my other fics/ in the show. And that's because I've made a very important and flimsy canon for myself. 
> 
> I think the recently dead can talk, but not very well, because they knew how to talk when they were alive, but now they're dead and ghosts, so it's all a little bit different now. They have to learn how to talk again in a different body.  
The ghosts that are a little bit old and have more experience of being a ghost can talk in longer and propper sentences because they also knew how to talk when they were alive, you know????  
And the older ghosts, like the ghosts Klaus saw when he was thrown into the mausoleum as a kid, are just so fucking old that they had forgotten how to speak and could do nothing but claw at him and moan. 
> 
> You know?? You get me?? Does that make any sense?? I don't know, but I just think it's a good thing to keep in mind as you read this in case you get a little confused. 
> 
> I just really missed writing TUA you guys, I mean, I really did. I needed to get my mojo back after writing so many Stranger Things fic's, and I thought TUA was the best way to do that. Anyway, enough of my bullshit rambling, I hope you enjoy this little stupid fic and that you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it x

Getting back into the swing of regular patrols should have been much harder than it was, in Klaus’s humble opinion, and the only difference between now and back when they were kids was that now they didn’t have Ben to tidy up all their problems for them and that without their daddy dearest to watch over their every move with his strict unsettling gaze now his siblings could take their anger out at Klaus for not doing his job whenever they felt like it.

See, he had always been nothing but the simple lookout, which had annoyed him all his life. When he was younger he didn’t pay much attention, too preoccupied with everything else going on around him and being jealous of his siblings doing all the cool shit. When he was an adult high on drugs and drunk on booze, he was pretty much useless. And now… everything was worse now.

But now he had Ben. While Klaus was too busy dealing with the ghosts screaming in his face, Ben was his eyes and ears. He let Klaus know when people were coming and when he was needed. Klaus didn’t always listen, of course, too busy with knife-wielding ghosts and screaming and the almighty hunger in his gut, but Ben didn’t really need him. Klaus was sober enough by now that Ben could take care of them himself.

Sometimes Klaus was useful, that was true, and a fact he was more than willing to stand behind. It was rare, sure, but sometimes he managed to push away the ghosts and shout out a warning to his siblings about incoming attackers or approaching back-up or some other deadly problem. Every now and then he would actually shout out information that the ghosts gave him about the reason they were there in the first place.

Today he fucked up.

It was all going so well and he was honestly so proud of himself but… then the ghosts started showing up. But not just any ghosts. Fresh ghosts, with their outlines bright and vivid, their moans so loud that Klaus’s ears actually rang. They shoved the mostly faded and ghastly ghosts out of the way so they could take their turn screaming in Klaus’s direction, and while the older ghosts that hung around Klaus, some familiar after the many years and some just passing through, couldn’t really speak after all that time doing nothing but haunting and moaning about, these ghosts actually spoke.

_“Huge,”_ one moaned, missing its eyes, it’s skull imploded._ “Monkey.”_

_“Blood,”_ said another, throat slit and bleeding profusely. _“Blades. It hurts.”_

_“She made me do it,”_ sobbed someone else, _“She made me. She made me.”_

_“Didn’t even see him,” _garbled another. _“He was gone and then he wasn’t.” _

Klaus felt his blood run cold and a quick glance at Ben proved that he felt the same way, and as the ghosts advanced on him, he felt his vision go dark as he clasped at his ears and swatted away unwanted hands, and Ben couldn’t even help him, because he too was being swallowed by the revelation.

He fucked up because they found him huddled in a corner on the floor with his legs pulled up to his chest and his arms basically wrapped around his head, and after a fateful sigh of disappointment, Luther hefted him up and dragged him towards the car where Vanya was waiting in the driver’s seat, Allison trying to mop up Diego’s blood in the back, and Klaus didn’t even have the energy to speak when Luther roughly shoved him in beside Five.

“What the fuck was that, Klaus?” Luther demanded as he pushed him into the foyer of the Hargreeve’s manor the moment they walked in, Allison and Vanya helping Diego limp in behind him. “You were supposed to be the look-out! It’s the simplest job and yet you couldn’t even focus long enough to do it! Diego got hurt because you weren’t paying attention.”

“It’s fine, Luther,” Diego grunted as he was lowered down the couch. “Leave it.”

Luther waved his arms about like a very angry ape. “It’s not fine! He does this all the time, and here I was thinking that him getting sober was going to help. But it’s not! You’re just as absent-minded as you were when we were kids!”

“Get lost, Luther,” Klaus tried to slink away with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t like everyone’s eyes on him. “Go find someone else to take your anger out on, I’m not in the mood.”

“I’m not doing that, Klaus,” Luther moved to stand in front of Klaus and block his exit out of the room. Klaus could basically smell the blood radiating off of him in waves, see the blood on his gloves, the ghosts moaning over his shoulder. “It’d be different if it was just like every other time, but Diego got hurt because you had your head up your ass, and that’s something I just can’t let slide.”

In the corner, Ben had his fists clenched at his sides and his eyes wide with wild and unbridled fury. “Let me kick his ass,” he said to Klaus, eyes on Luther. “We both know I can do it, let me do it, Klaus.”

Klaus shook his head slightly. “Don’t Ben, he’s not worth it,” he craned his head to look up at Luther. “Can you get out of my personal space, please? You spell like a wet monkey and I just washed my clothes.”

Luther’s eyes flared but it was Allison, still crouched down beside Diego on the couch, who spoke. “He’s right, Klaus,” she agreed, surprising no-one. “You weren’t paying attention and Diego paid the price. If you’re going to start coming out with us again on patrols, then you need to get your head in the game.”

That sobbing ghost currently standing behind Allison and looking at the back of her head, forlorn and heartbroken, and reached out and tried to touch her as he did with Klaus, but his hand just went straight through her. “Oh, agreeing with Luther, are you? None of us saw that coming.”

Diego sniggered on the couch and Vanya hastily hid her smile behind her hand. Ben was roaring with laughter. Allison looked at them both with disdain and in the opposite corner to Ben, Five was shaking his head in disappointment. “I can’t understand why you have such an aversion to any and all seriousness and how you’ve managed to stay alive all this time. It’s obnoxious.”

“Well, if you’re too serious, you can’t have any fun, isn’t that right big fella?” The question was directed at Luther, who blinked hard and took a step back in shock, remembering that fateful night at the club. Klaus remembered it too, and he rubbed his hands together. “Now, if you’d excuse me, I have places to be and people to see, and I promised Ben that I would take him shopping, so if you wouldn’t _mind_…”

As Klaus tried to pass him, Luther sighed heavily through his nose and placed a hand on Klaus’s shoulder, keeping him still and essentially stopping him from passing him. “That’s not a good enough excuse, Klaus, and you know it,” As Luther spoke, Klaus felt a wave of overwhelming anger bubbling up inside him that threatened to find its way out of his insides. “Either you start giving us a straight answer or you’re not coming with us anymore.”

“Luther, fucking drop it, alright?”

Vanya piped up. “I think that’s enough.” She said quietly. “It’s been a long day. We should all get some sleep.”

“No, Vanya, I’m not going to let it go,” Luther snapped and Vanya sank back. Ben looked furious. He turned back to Klaus. “Either you tell me why you’re not doing your job or you’re going to stay here the next time we go out.”

Klaus just… lost it.

“Yeah, well, if I didn’t have to constantly deal with the ghosts of all the people you killed then maybe I’d do a better job at it!” Klaus shouted and he felt the anger resonate deep within his bones. He slammed his open palms into Luther's chest as hard as he could, which wasn't very hard compared to Luther's might, but it had the desired effect. Luther took a step back as if Klaus had slapped him right across the face. Ben looked proud. Everyone else, including Vanya and Five, looked at him in astonishment.

He just turned on his heel and stormed away.

Ben followed behind him, wanting to make sure his brother was alright, but behind Klaus’s back he turned around and stuck his tongue out at Luther as he passed him. He considered that punishment enough, at least until Klaus was feeling strong enough to make him solid.

Klaus had made his way to the roof and laid down on the tiles, staring up at the sky. It was cold, and he wasn’t wearing nearly enough clothes for this, but he just needed to get away from that house, away from those people and the ghosts that hung around his siblings like a bad smell, spilling their guts out all over the polished floor that Grace spent so long trying to tidy. The anger still coiled within him, but it was a different kind of anger now that he was out under the stars, as if it were slowly subsiding.

Just when he was starting to enjoy the peacefulness of solidarity, Ben stuck his head out of the hatch that led from the attic to the roof. “Klaus?” He asked, making his way up the ladder. “What are you doing out here? It’s cold, you should come inside where it’s warm. Grace can make you a hot chocolate.”

“No offence, Benny boy,” Klaus sighed, folding his arms behind his head. “But I’d rather be alone right now if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Oh,” Ben faltered. A look of hurt crossed his face, but Klaus didn’t worry about that right now. He had hurt Ben so many times over the course of his ghostly life that he was sure that asking for a little privacy wouldn’t be too much of a big deal. “Yeah, sure, whatever you need. I’ll see if I can prank Luther or something.”

“It’s just for a little while,” Klaus amended when he heard the pain in Ben’s voice. “I won’t be up here for long, it’ll probably start raining soon, and then we can watch Dirty Dancing or Sex and the City or something.”

A laugh told Klaus without even looking at him that Ben had forgiven him, and again without looking, he knew that Ben was gone, into the ether that ghosts went when they weren’t busy bothering Klaus, but he was very well aware that Ben traded bothering him for bothering Luther instead, which was a valiant sacrifice that Klaus was willing to make.

The memory of the recent ghostly addition to his undead posse still shook Klaus to his core and the thought of his siblings, who until now he had considered a little weak as piss, maybe with the exception of Five who everyone knew was a stone-cold killer, actually made him feel like something was gnawing at his bones. Just thinking about it made him sick.

Luther, big dumb Luther who was more brutal and violent as a kid then he was now, especially after being sent to the moon for all that time, who used to throw people off multi-story buildings for fun or kick ass so hard he broke bones. It had been so long that Klaus hadn’t even considered him doing anything more than heavy lifting, even when he and Diego were fighting, that he couldn’t imagine him killing anyone, much less hitting someone so hard that their eyes exploded out of their head.

And Allison, the movie star who got everything she ever wanted, how the hell could Klaus look at her and think murderer? She was brutal, sure, and had always been a good fighter, but Klaus couldn’t ever remember her killing anyone. And she had made some random person kill themselves just because she could? How was Klaus supposed to look at her now?

There were always ghosts around Five and with Diego, killing people was just expected, but now he had to deal with more ghosts and more-

“Hey,” Klaus turned, snapped out of his thoughts by Diego of all people climbing up onto the roof through the hatch in the roof. “What the f-fuck are you doing up here?”

“Trying to avoid the rest of you fuck-wits,” Klaus answered honestly, and begrudgingly moved over for Diego when he kicked him in the side. “What do you want?”

Grunting, Diego lowered himself down onto the roof beside Klaus. “Well, I want a lot of things. First off, I want a drink so strong that it’ll knock me on my ass. I want a hot woman with nice hands to kiss me until I can’t breathe. I want to punch that smug look off of Luther’s m-monkey face. But right now,” he pretended to think. “I want to know why my brother’s come up here by himself after literally just dumping a fucking motherlode of information on us.” He looked pointedly at Klaus. “So? What was that all about?”

“You know, I was really hoping that at least one of you fuckers would understand not wanting to talk about something, with all your secrets and whatnot, but I suppose none of you knows how to take a fucking hint.” Klaus sighed. “What do you want me to say? I’d do the whole _‘I see dead people’_ thing but you already know all about it, so I’m kind of out of new material.”

Diego was silent for a moment while he thought and Klaus held his breath in anticipation. “Was that true, what you told us? Were you always so bad at being the look-out because you were trying to deal with the ghosts of the people we killed in our missions?”

Licking his lips, Klaus turned to face Diego, who already had his face turned and his eyes on his brother. “What, did you always think that I was nothing but a useless screw-up?” Diego glanced away, ashamed. “You guys have always had ghosts around you. Always. That’s why I started the drugs when I did- I couldn’t be in the same house as you when you were always surrounded by ghosts moaning at you.”

Looking a little like he wanted to throw up, Diego powered on, but his voice was significantly smaller. “W-who had the most? Ghosts, I mean.”

Klaus thought for a moment. “Ben,” he said eventually. “Then you, then Five. But it’s all changed now. I don’t see Ben’s ghosts anymore, haven’t since he died. Five has the most now, then you, and I think maybe Allison is next, but I don’t think she killed them all, not on purpose at least. I don’t know how many I have, or if I have any at all. Ghosts are always around me- who knows if I killed them or not.”

For a few long moments, the brothers were silent, with nobody watching them but the stars. “That’s really fucked up, Klaus,”

“I know,” Klaus said. For a moment, he felt that hopelessness starting to devour him, like the cold slimy fingers of a ghost down his neck, but he shrugged it off and grinned, slapping Diego in the shoulder and making him wince. “But if it makes you feel any better, the guy Luther killed called him a monkey, and I think that’s a win for all of us.”

But Diego didn’t laugh at Luther’s expense like he normally would, and Klaus wished Ben was there to bounce his stupid comments off of, but Ben wasn’t there, and Klaus had to deal with Diego by himself. “All this time, we just thought that you were incompetent and didn’t want to be there, but you were busy fighting with all the people we killed.”

“I mean; you weren’t far off. I’m still pretty incompetent,” Klaus joked. “I think I came up with my best ideas while I was high, honestly.”

“Luther needs to apologise,” Diego said quietly, mostly to himself. “He needs to pull his fat head out of his hairy ass and realize that he’s the one who fucked up, not you.”

Snorting, Klaus kicked his feet and the heels of his boots whacked against the tiles on the roof. “Ah, but you know Luther. When has he ever accepted being wrong? It’d be easier to convince him to go back to the moon for another four years then it would be to get him to apologise for being a dick, as he so often is.” He elbowed Diego in the side. “Don’t worry about it, I’m used to it at this point.”

“What did they say to you, other than the fact that Luther was a monkey?” This time, Diego’s lip did curve up a little bit, as if it wasn’t physically able to stop it from happening.

“Oh, you know, the usual,” Klaus shrugged. “’Ow, it hurts’, ‘oh god, I’m dead’, ‘they killed me ughhh’. That sort of stuff. To be totally fair, you guys did an absolute _number_ on those thugs, I mean really, one dude was missing his eyeballs!”

Diego actually looked a little bit sick. “Yeah, well, Luther shouldn’t have gone so hard. We thought we were going non-lethal for this run. Luther changed the game plan almost instantly.”

“Well, maybe he needs a good fuck,” Klaus suggested and Diego coked on his spit. “You know, to release some of that pent up energy he’s feeling. Maybe that’s all he needs to stop him from being such a pompous, stuck up prick all the time.”

“I’m not sure,” Diego snorted, “He’d have, uh, 'pop his cherry' so to speak, and I’m not so sure he’s willing to do that. You know how high and mighty he is. Or heroic leader would never debase himself so much to give into mortal impulses like sex.”

Klaus laughed like someone who had a secret because he did. “Oh mate, he’s already lost it,” Diego looked at him with wide eyes.

“Bullshit.”

“Oh yeah, buddy boy. While you guys were off piss-farting around, I had to take care of our dear brother at a night club,” Klaus giggled with glee. “I was there. They came back here and spent the night in his room. She was hot, but she liked him because he had his shirt off and was part monkey, and she thought it was a costume.”

Diego looked like he had just been slapped in the face. “You’re fucking with me, right?” Klaus shook his head with that shit-eating grin on his face. “And you didn’t fucking tell me?”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch, I was never going to, but Luther really pissed me off today,” Klaus replied. “So I thought some payback was in order, in the form of mutual embarrassment.”

There was laughter between them for a couple of long moments before Diego suddenly turned sombre and sat up, looking at Klaus with a serious expression and strangely open eyes. “Y-you’re ok?” he said, but it sounded more like a question. It could have been in relation to anything, but somehow, Klaus knew what he was talking about.

But was he? Was he really alright, after having a full-on conversation with the ghosts his siblings had newly killed, being thrown comatose into the back of a car by his disdainful siblings and then being told that the whole time they just thought he was being useless and lazy when really, he was fighting a very real battle all on his own that none of them could ever understand? Was he alright?

Was he, or did he just say that he was to avoid thinking too deeply about it? He wasn’t sure. Ben would know. Ben always knew.

“Of course I am,” Klaus laughed and Diego’s face immediately softened. “Diego, my brother who I love so dearly, you know me. When I am ever not ok? I’m more than just fantastic my dude! I’m going to go downstairs, take a nap, and then watch The Notebook with Ben or something. I’m all good!”

Diego looked him over one last time with a critical eye before nodding and squeezing Klaus on the shoulder, a little harder than was necessary, before he stood up on shaky legs, wincing at the pain, and wobbled his way back towards the hatch to the attic. “Right. Of course you are you crazy fuck. But I’m here if you need me. Anytime, anywhere. You know that, r-right?”

“Of course,” Klaus snorted, waving him off with an absent wave of his hand. “Now get out of here. You look like you’re about to pass out, and I’m amazing in every way, but I’m not strong enough to pull your ugly butt up and over the roof. Shoo.” He waved Diego off with both hands, his nails glittering in under the light of the moon. “I’m sick of looking at your face.”

He listened to Diego’s laughter fade down the hatch, and then echo off into silence.

It was late, and Klaus was tired. He knew that he should really crawl down through the hatch after his brother and check-in with Ben, maybe find some dark corner to huddle into and escape the world for a while, or at least, escape the still-living members of his family. They could be a real bummer sometimes, and a pain in his ass _all_ the time.

But he was under the stars, watching them slowly wink in and out of existence as if they were winking at him, and really, there was no better place he’d rather be.

Except maybe in a nice warm bed watching Pretty Little Liars with Ben with a big bowl of popcorn ‘shared between them’ and a nice warm cup of hot chocolate. Yeah. That sounded better.

**Author's Note:**

> I MADE LUTHER THE BAD GUY IN THIS BECAUSE I NEEDED AN ANTAGONIST AND HE'S THE CLOSEST THING TO IT HE'S NOT A BAD GUY LEAVE ME BE AHHH
> 
> Also, that word?? Incompetents?? It really doesn't look right to me, so if both me and Google have spelled it wrong, please for all that is good in holy could you please let me know??? Please???


End file.
